Journal

Relampago! Created by Judge Garza in Corpus Christi, Tx. On record as the first Latino American superhero.

Sometime last year I was asked to contribute, with other creators from the broad spectrum of “Geek Culture”, to a collection of essays. The point of the collection, as I understood it, was to create a sense of empowerment in young people who identified as geeks and were getting some grief because of it. So, basically, stories in which we, the authors, had felt embattled for who we were and what we loved, and how we coped.

The collection hasn’t come out yet, but I’ve decided to post my essay here in advance. It’s about a lot of things. Mostly it’s about the 1980’s Role Playing Game scare and how that affected the bible belt community in which I lived as an avid gamer. But it’s also about my first comic book store in Corpus Christi, and the legendary man who ran it, Judge Margarito C. Garza, creator of the first Latino American superhero. And it’s about my family, about how I was raised (the dark and the light of it), and the part that geek culture played in politicizing me. Basically it’s comics, role playing games, family and politics. It’s all here.

It’s not a honed piece of writing. I’m not sure if it deserves to be published. It’s pretty wild and broad in its swing, but I present it for anyone interested in the great “Role Playing Scare” of the 80’s, or for any other South Texan who might remember those fine and perfect days at Collector’s World, and would like to read my recollections on the Judge who ran it, and hear how he managed to change my life.

The real problem, of course, is that the ideas don’t stop coming. Everything I see can be pounded into a story. It taxes me. All the old new things, the lives lived around me, on either side of me, front and back of me, the thick paragraphs in books and the emotions caught in filmic light, every howl in the face of injustice, every loving nuzzle, it inspires. It’s exhausting. There isn’t enough fuel in my writing hand or in my writer’s mind. Not enough ink. Not enough time. What forests would be swallowed by my first drafts alone? Read more

“The Raid 2: Berandal” does everything better than its predecessor, “The Raid Redemption”…Except for what “Raid Redemption” did best.

To start, this is a very good movie. It’s more expansive, more artfully directed, more ambitious and more scripted than its predecessor. The music and mood and style is just as good as before and in many instances better. In every way Director/writer/co-editor/action choreographer and all around Welshman Gareth Evans has grown as a filmmaker, or at the very least, has moved into a position where he can now show off several directorial talents that the first “Raid” didn’t allow for. With his newfound success he has been afforded the joy of juicing up his monster international martial arts franchise. But in doing so he has left behind, either intentionally or through oversight, the very engine that made the first “Raid” sing so loudly.

So I’m watching COSMOS by buying each episode individually as they come out on VUDU. I like the idea of paying for this. I like the idea of supporting each and every episode. Making sure that my money goes towards it in the most direct way possible. As I went to watch the second episode last night I noticed something irritating in the shows description paragraph on the episode menu screen, which I assume was written by some lackey at FOX. It said, essentially, that the episode was about how life “possibly” came to be on earth. “Possibly”, it said. Read more